Comment by joefourier
4 hours ago
It absolutely is noticeable the moment you have to run several of these electron “apps” at once.
I have a MacBook with 16GB of RAM and I routinely run out of memory from just having Slack, Discord, Cursor, Figma, Spotify and a couple of Firefox tabs open. I went back to listening to mp3s with a native app to have enough memory to run Docker containers for my dev server.
Come on, I could listen to music, program, chat on IRC or Skype, do graphic design, etc. with 512MB of DDR2 back in 2006, and now you couldn’t run a single one of those Electron apps with that amount of memory. How can a billion dollar corporation doing music streaming not have the resources to make a native app, but the Songbird team could do it for free back in 2006?
I’ve shipped cross platform native UIs by myself. It’s not that hard, and with skyrocketing RAM prices, users might be coming back to 8GB laptops. There’s no justification for a big corporation not to have a native app other than developer negligence.
On that note, I could also comfortably fit a couple of chat windows (skype) on a 17'' CRT (1024x768) back in those days. It's not just the "browser-based resource hog" bit that sucks - non-touch UIs have generally become way less space-efficient.